


4D

by the_fox333



Category: Original Work
Genre: Original Universe, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-15 21:54:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8074072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_fox333/pseuds/the_fox333
Summary: My favorite of my fictional world ideas, 4D revolves around the following concept: what if humanity discovers how to travel faster than light?10/2/16: Now documenting major events up to 2060! Also, the title makes sense now (thanks, Margaret Nikodemus)!





	

All it took was a single experiment, and life would never be the same.

For decades, scientists had speculated on the mechanics of quantum physics. On a quantum scale, objects moved erratically, as both a particle and a wave. Due to how measuring techniques worked, you could know either their position or their speed; measuring one would change the other. It would change the measured variable too, forcing the particle to "decide" where it was or how fast it was going. What if, scientists reasoned, you could force it to choose the position you wanted?

This was the driving idea behind the years of teleportation research funded by the United Nations. An international lab was established in Russia in the fall of 2019, and researchers set about testing various methods of forcing mass particle relocation.

Omino Alo'hi, a 32-year-old from Honolulu, first came up with the idea of exposing particles to quarkoids. If the quarkoids themselves were waves, they reasoned, they could interact with the target particle/wave and change its properties. The idea was scorned by many others- until they caused eight out of ten uranium atoms to, when fired through a field of quarkoids, simultaneously vanish and reappear approximately three meters ahead. This discovery, nicknamed the First Verification, would pave the way for another decade of teleporatation research.

The technique was adopted and refined by Omino's peers, and it was soon used to transport even hydrogen atoms with a 99.99999% success rate. It was found that the concentration of quarkoids, not the object's speed, increased the distance traveled. On February 11, 2020, the first multi-celled organism was sent 500 meters across the testing room, followed by a mouse two days later.

After six months of unanimously successful tests, the UN deemed the procedure safe for voluntary human testing. On August 21st, 2020, Russian stunt pilot Mikhael Obvtruski crushed and invalidated the land speed record by driving a car one kilometer in what was measured as 0.000000000000 seconds. Another two years of varied distance and speed tests, and in October of 2022, the UN officially declared that it was safe for the general public.

Amtrak, Delta Airlines, Lufthansa, and numerous other transportation providers started a bidding war for the right to use the technology. After only a week of corporate struggle, the patent was sold unexpectedly to Elon Musk for eight billion dollars. Two days later, Musk announced a groundbreaking plan: he would install massive "warp gates" in seven major cities around the globe, allowing instantaneous travel anywhere in the world. The announcement was accompanied by crashing stock prices of many airlines and their subsequent acquisition by the remaining ones.

The plans for the Tesla WarpGates were highly classified, but in 2023, WikiLeaks published an interdepartmental memo detailing the current design. It consisted of a hundred-foot-diameter metal ring suspended by electromagnets over a concrete base. The disk would rotate to point to the desired city, and hovercars could travel through the field and be warped to their destination. The leak created much hype and speculation, but six years later, there was still no sign of a final product.

On New Year's Eve of 2030, tragedy struck. Islamic extremists smuggled a graviton bomb into the middle of the Berlin festivities. As the year turned, the bomb went off, and a two-kilometer-wide sphere was crushed into a super-dense ball 1/1000th the size. 25 million people were killed, and that evening, three similar weapons were used by the US government to annihilate three major radical-controlled cities. Amidst the mourning and outrage, Musk quietly bought the spherical crater and put millions of dollars towards decompressing the ball and filling it back in.

A year of breakneck work later, and it was done. Musk sold the resculpted land to the German government with the exception of the very center, where he erected a redesigned WarpGate. Even as the city was rebuilt around it, the floating golden circle filled with a shimmering blue curtain served as a global symbol of civilization's resilience and ingenuity.

By 2038, the remaining six WarpGates had been installed in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Beijing. The gates were so successful that Musk, all the richer from donations and government grants, ordered another wave in Orlando, Rome, Moscow, Seoul, Johannesburg, Sydney, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, and New Delhi. The world was becoming connected, and cultures were beginning to bleed together in the gated cities. Huge hovercars dubbed "airliners" were constructed by the remaining airlines, allowing huge numbers of passengers to travel quickly. The advent of fusion technology in September of 2038 cut travel prices astronomically, costing only as much as a toll booth rather than an airplane flight.

2040 came and went. A radical atheist group known as the International Organization of Truth emerged and was quickly stamped out, lacking the location or the funding to spread terror effectively. Elon Musk passed away from a heart attack on February 30th, and his daughter Claudia took over as CEO of his businesses and overseer of the WarpGate project. NASA lost what little remained of its funding and was forced to all but shut down, keeping its satellites and instruments operational with scarce donations and grants. Northern Ireland discovered a species of seabird once thought extinct nesting on its western shore, and intense protection efforts made it a hero of the conservationist community.

As years went, 2040 was a good one, but nothing compared to the following. On January 19th, President Omar Noroha of the Democratic Saudi Arabian State annouced intentions to send a manned expedition to the moon using a knockoff WarpGate. Claudia Musk responded by declassifying plans already underway for a quarter-mile-wide gate and lunar exploratory base in Nevada. In the race between world and corporate superpowers, corporate won, and only six months later a vessel dubbed the Hecate I, carrying five astronauts, materialized five miles above the lunar surface and came to a graceful landing in the largest televised event since the 2026 Winter Olympics. John Kelley of the USA, Illa Nuage of France, Ryan Skarkof of Russia, and Chen Sho-Jacobsen of China would all have their places in the history books, but it was Ro Naren of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that won the day with her line, "There have been many great days in human history, but I think this will go down as one of the greatest."

With the future of WarpGates in space exploration, Musk publicized their patent. Buying the rights to maintain NASA's instruments, she turned the energies of SpaceX towards gate-assisted colonization of the moon. The crew of the first and second Hecate missions constructed a moon gate and set up a tracking station to increase the precision with which the gates could be aimed. On a single planet, where everything was fixed in relation to everything else, this hadn't been a problem, but the vast distances and constant motion of space required pinpoint accuracy.

It wasn't long at all before competitors realized the difficulties of accurate gate aiming. With the great distances involved in space travel, a delay between disappearance and reappearance became evident. Gate travel was still much faster than light, but the tiny delays involved in getting to even the moon could throw off the arrival location by dozens of kilometers. If interplanetary travel was attempted without accurate delay calculations, the resulting inaccuracy could be fatal.

The solution came in a college sophomore named Eli Warner. In a research paper, he devised a formula to determine the speed at which objects traveled when charged by a gate. Eli was quickly given a paid internship by SpaceX's biggest competitor, the DSASSA (Democratic Saudi Arabian State Space Agency), and his formula was lauded as essential to the progress of interstellar travel.

And interstellar travel was the goal. In the summer of 2045, a permanent colony had been established on the moon and several temporary ones on Mars. Many lesser agencies were developing ideas for the use of Jupiter's moons, but it again came down to SpaceX and the DSASSA racing towards the Alpha Centauri system. Concerns about air leaking through planet-space warp gates had been addressed by vacuum-sealing launch chambers, so the biggest obstacle left was how to set up there.

From the start, the New Space Race was highly classified, with launches taking all but the technicians by surprise. July saw the European Union take up the challenge, but SpaceX was the first to get a probe to the distant solar system. The delay was recorded as 23 hours, and the signal verifying this took 23 more to return to Earth. On its strategically decaying orbit around the star, the probe sent back high-res pictures of planets Proxima B and Alpha BC. Alpha BC was far too close to the star to harbor life, but Proxima B possessed traits very similar to those of Earth, albeit half the size. In fact, the planet appeared from the images to be mostly covered in liquid. SpaceX had found their target.

The DSASSA soon picked up on the existence of Proxima B, followed shortly by the EU, but it was too late. SpaceX was once again the pioneer; on November 23rd, a colony ship appeared on the outskirts of the Alpha Centauri system and began a careful spiraling descent.

But the EU refused to be upstaged. After two months of intensive catch-up work, their shuttle was warped in only 100 kilometers from Proxima B's surface. As Mission Control looked on with the 23-hour delay, a fuel tank cracked halfway down, and by 20 kilometers one of the three thrusters was dead. The ship spiraled to a crash landing, killing Zared Nomska of Slovakia and knocking out the warpcomm module. The crew was forced to evacuate to the sideways greenhouse, where they survived until the SpaceX colony ship landed nearby four months later.

With the establishment of a habitable environment only a day's travel away from Earth, humanity had officially colonized another star system. Back around the Sun, which had been officially re-dubbed Sol, the Moon had become a thriving megalopolis, and was petitioning the UN for independent statehood. Mars was divided in 2050 between the EU, the DSA, the Pan-African Union, the United British States, the Russian Federation, the Asian Confederation, the USA, Brazil and Southern American States, Australia and United Oceanic Territories, Canada, and the Middle American Alliance by the Martian Agreement, ratified in New York City. Plans were already underway for colonization of Europa and Ganymede, expanding towards the outer reaches of the Sol system.

Warp gates kept a bustling trade going between every colony. Each would produce whatever it could and sell it to buy whatever it needed. Even controlled by their respective governments, it sometimes seemed like the colonies were independent nations. But all of humanity was linked by a common currency, the Dol (a cross between dollar and Sol), and the common tongue of Universal.

Each of the nine world powers had it's own distinct traits. The EU was one of the oldest, still operating as a collection of semi-independent states. The PAU, the Asian Confederation, and BSAS had copied this format with varying levels of success. The UBS operated under a representative democracy, much like it always had, and the Russian Federation, the DSA, and AUOT acted as single nations. All powers did need some level of division with their colonies, but some were more suited to the task than others.

Out of all the nations, the USA had changed the most. In 2047, huge governmental reforms took place, overhauling many things that made America's government so iconically strange. Most notably, presidential elections were altered from first-past-the-post to runoff, allowing for many parties and candidates to have a chance at victory. But voting reforms were not all that had happened. Spearheaded by Claudia Musk and Musk Enterprises, America was becoming an increasingly corporate-controlled nation. Businesses would sponsor entire cities, and brand-based borders were mapped to show the sway of each conglomerate. America had always been capitalist, but it was quickly becoming the core principle.

And yet with all the change, much remained the same. In December of 2052, climate researchers made a grave prediction: humanity had ten years before the planet passed the point of no return and would have to be abandoned. The CEOs of Musk Enterprises, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook Connectivity Inc. jumped at the proclamation, and within a month all had plans to send global warming into retrograde by 2055. Various governments sponsored one plan or another, but all the Dols in the world couldn't change the present. Global climate had been creeping up for half a century, and just now people were realizing how much it had changed things. Major coastal cities had been evacuated and deserts inundated with floods, but this was lost amidst the euphoria of space pioneering. Now, with efforts at a lull, humanity was realizing just how much they had screwed up.

But in the meantime, life chugged on. On January 14th, 2053, Delta Transportation held the inaugural flight of its twin mega-airliners, the Arkhalia and the Xenalia. The largest of their class, each could carry 40,000 passengers and 3,000 crew and were just small enough to fit through the existing city warp gates. Launched in New York City, the Arkhalia traveled to London at 12:53 GMT, and the Xenalia to Berlin at 1:04 GMT. But just as the gate fired up and aimed at Berlin, the electromagnet drivers failed. The Xenalia came in two degrees to the left of its intended target, smashing through the World Terrorism Memorial and plowing into a row of apartment buildings. Two million people in total were killed, and rumors raced that the disaster had been intentional. Two NYC gate workers were brought to court but had all charges dropped, and fear of terror sprang up again. Historians likened it to the Islamic scare of the 2010s, with candidates for leadership positions promising to bring the perpetrators to justice. After a diplomatic struggle, it was decided the new World Terrorism Memorial would not bear the names of the Xenalia victims.

2055 came and went, with three of the four climate control plans put into effect and two returning significant results. Human life on Earth might be saved, after all. Even if it wasn't, Earth was not the only option by far. The Moon had declared independence from its colonizers, Mars was being given an atmosphere, and bases were slowly taming the Jovian moons. The Alpha Centauri colony, a constant reminder of how far humanity had come, was returning astonishing new data about relative stellar positions, and local flora had long since been domesticated to provide a stable, reliable food source.

2056 would have been an unremarkable year if not for one world-shaking event. On December 26, the Arkhalia was on a routine trip from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney. Everything checked out: all systems were go, all lights were green; buckle up, it'll be a smooth ride. But at 19:56 GMT, the Arkhalia passed through the field of blue- and was never seen again.

The Arkhalia Disaster brought civilization to a standstill. Many were now afraid to use warp gates, and airliner ticket sales plummeted. Scientists from all corners of the Sol system scrambled to determine what had caused the failure. Examining the gate logs, they found that everything was in perfect working order. The particle concentration was perfect, the electromagnet drivers were calibrated, and there was no power failure within 96 hours of the disappearance. So what had happened?

This was the driving question behind an full year of research. As humanity desperately tried to adapt its interstellar empire to the potential lethality of gate use, the greatest thinkers in the system gathered to determine what the problem might be. It was agreed that to understand the mechanics of the disaster, they would first have to understand the mechanics of the gates themselves.

And therein lay the problem. Ever since quarkoid teleportation was invented 38 years prior, everyone from physicists to philosophers had tried to figure out what made it work. It was clearly a property of the quarkoids, but nobody was certain how they did what they did.

The breakthrough came on June 11th, 2057. A theoretical physicist named Karl Jonsohn was sitting in his Sao Paolo living room fiddling with some decimal cubes. The discovery was documented in his memoir, _Here to There: Innovating in the Era of Warp Gates_ :

"I held a taut sheet and slid the cubes back and forth, watching the way they turned as they slid. I soon began to tire of this little game, and came up with a way to make it more interesting. Loosening the cloth, I snapped it taut again, launching the cubes a short distance into the air. As they tumbled back down, landing at different points on the sheet, a thought struck me. By adding another dimension, I had greatly reduced travel time without eliminating it altogether. What if that was exactly what the warp gates did?"

Scientists had long theorized the existence of a fourth spatial dimension, but now it was a scientifically valid possibility. Equations were performed and simulations were run, and it was shown that a fourth dimension would perfectly explain many attributes of the gates. But how did they use it?

Again, the key discovery came from a theoretical physicist, this time in a lab at MIT. To take a break from the Arkhalia mystery, Eric Rodenas was factoring fourth-dimentionality into several well-tested theories regarding dimensional interaction. He reportedly was looking through a sheaf of notes when he "stopped, stared intently, then grinned like a cat and dashed out of the room shouting 'Of course! It's so simple!'"

Rodenas had realized that in order for an n-dimensional object to exist in (n+1)-dimensional space, it would need to gain a dimension. Warp gates likely did this by temporarily granting matter a fourth dimension with a duration determined by quarkoid concentration. So what if the object didn't lose its extra dimension? It still didn't fully make sense, but it was the best possibility anybody had.

Margaret Nikodemus, a high school senior in Paris, was the next to provide revelation. Nikodemus utilized the widely accepted hypothesis of nested dimensions in a shockingly simple conjuncture presented at the emergency conference of the UN Committee for Scientific Advancement. "Consider second-dimensional travel in a one-dimensional world," she explained to the committee. "To travel outside the single dimension, one would need to be 'bumped' by a particle traveling second-dimensionally. This bump would send the target on a shallow parabola, eventually re-entering its native dimension." This was an excellent explanation for the functioning of warp gates, and had she left it there, she would have been praised for her revelation even without solving the mystery.

However, Nikodemus would not be satisfied with reaching halfway. "But if one of the particles delivering the initial push carried more energy than average," she continued, "the energy transferred would be greater than expected. If an unusual concentration of highly energetic particles was present, the object's parabola could grow theoretically indefinitely, taking more and more time to return and possibly even passing right through the original dimension."

Nikodemus's presentation was followed by shocked silence, then a standing ovation that all but guaranteed her a four-year scholarship at a college of her choice. Best of all, the hypothesis explained the minor anomalies in Warner's travel time formula. Margaret's idea was published in magazines all over the system, and analysis was done to reveal the vast improbability of such an event happening. Still, many no longer trusted warp gates, and while interplanetary travel resumed, it was no longer as profitable as it once was.

By the dawn of 2060, civilization was once more expanding in leaps and bounds. Probes were being warped into Jupiter to analyze conditions at various depths, and super-light collection facilities were being tested to retrieve crystalized hydrogen from the upper layers. Massive roving mining bases were slowly devouring the asteroid belt to provide the long-since-drained Earth with precious metals and minerals. The anti-global warming plans were making incredible progress, and global temperatures were lower then they had been since 2000. The Russian Federation had fallen on hard times and merged with the Asian Confederation, and the United British Federation had reacquired Australia, leaving only the United Oceanic Territories. The Moon was no longer a unified state, having split into the nations of the Northern Polar Region, Gale Crater and United Adjacent Territories, and Blasphemy Ridge. Parts of Mars were declaring independence, threatening humanity's 35-year war-free record if their demands weren't met.

Proxima B was the year's party crasher. On October 29th, a massive solar flare was detected with only fifteen minutes for the colonies to prepare. Nearly half were caught with their radiation shields down, incinerating all within, and immeasurable damage was done to all crops and wildlife. The event reminded Sol citizens of their own 'disaster scenario', and Claudia Musk started a foundation to install radiation shields in all major cities across the system.

But aside from these setbacks, everything seemed to be going smoothly. Expansion was outrunning population growth, and with the Arkhalia Problem reduced to a learning example for textbooks and the Proxima B flares another date for history students to remember, no major obstacles stood between humans and the rest of the galaxy. For the first time in centuries, a New World once again existed, ready to be explored and colonized.

But in those centuries, it seemed humanity had forgotten what they encountered the last time they went to a new world.

**Author's Note:**

> 10 points to whoever can remember what the biggest obstacle to European conquest of the New World was. (But don't spoil it for those who can't.)
> 
>  
> 
> I am constantly tweaking small details, like the appearance of quarkoid fields and the manufacturer of the Arkhalia and Xenalia, so don't go memorizing any of this just yet.
> 
> Disclaimer: quarkoids are not real. I needed a particle that could do what they're desrcibed as doing, so I invented it.


End file.
